Thalassa, Thalassa

On the way to the Florida Keys. These comments, of course, are jotted on paper. Our trip south involves a meeting with the wider family, its branches arriving at various times, one branch bringing Monique's portable HP and re-connection to the world wide web. This was a brutal day in many respects because I'd foolishly failed to ask Google to give me a step-by-minute-step guide to reaching our goal, and therefore the trip here, vivid with sunshine and marked by splendid sights of all sorts of places, not least the downtowns of Orlando and of Miami, took many hours because, avoiding the Florida Tollway as much as we could (a major offense), we followed I-95 into Miami itself and then grimly slugged our way through south-Miami following U.S. 1. Amazingly that densely-populated south-east region of the great city has nowhere on it any kind of free-way at all, hence we traveled in a vast snake of cars, occupying three lanes, from one light to the next. We lost count by about the 36th--around about 250th Street. Two big impressions:

Not all the states of the union are "countries," properly speaking, but Florida certainly is. This time we drove almost the full length of it, but memories of earlier trips to both coasts and into Florida's center (I once attended an ultralight aircraft convention there) produce enough additional material to form a composite. The state is extraordinarily diverse--and must be hell for politicians trying to reach its greatly varied populations.

The second impression? It was made by the aqua-colored and raised median separating single lanes of traffic approaching and leaving Key Largo, and from this road, yes still decidedly U.S. 1 but now called the Overseas Highway, we got occasional glimpses of the sea. Thalassa, thalassa!